Belief in heaven and hell
I’ve recently seen quite a few questions from Christians on social media forums asking atheists why they are not terrified of ending up in hell. And assumptions (mainly from Americans) that belief in hell is the mark of being a Christian.
My father was a Protestant minister, and I grew up in a rural Protestant culture in Australia. As a child I went to lots of church services and never heard anyone trying to claim hell was a real rather than a metaphorical place. There probably were people in the congregations who believed in a literal hell, but I never heard any discussion of hell in church. I assumed that belief in a literal hell was reserved for fundamentalists — a relatively small proportion of Christians in the countries I’ve lived in. I also assumed that for religious people focused on love and kindness it would be clear that hell is a mythological concept dating from primitive times. Literally believing your God would torture people for eternity marks you out as having pre-modern values.
I decided to see what the data from the World Values Survey (WVS) and the European Values Study (EVS) tell us about the prevalence of belief in heaven and hell. I included all surveys carried out between 2010 and 2020 which included the two questions “Do you believe in heaven?” and “Do you believe in hell?” Both these had simple Yes/No response categories. This resulted in survey data for 248 surveys in 108 countries.
I was stunned by the differences between the USA and other developed countries^1. In the USA, 86% of Christians believe in heaven, and 81% believe in hell. Belief in hell is around 80% for all Christian denominations, over 90% for Muslims and even exceeds 50% in the group who say they have no religious affiliation.
In the developed countries excluding USA, 52% of Christians believe in heaven and only 42% believe in hell. It is the Orthodox and Roman Catholics who keep the belief in hell above 40%. Only one third of “Other Christian”, which includes Evangelicals, say they believe in hell and even fewer Protestants. The only religious group where more than half believe in hell are Muslims (of whom 72% say they believe in hell).
In Australia, only 46% of Christians believe in hell, compared to 65% who believe in heaven. There is almost no difference in the proportions of Christians who believe in heaven and hell in the USA, whereas there is a substantial difference for Christians in Australia, with 20% more Christians believing in heaven than in hell.
I expected Switzerland to have higher levels of belief in heaven and hell, given its history as one of the centres of the Protestant reformation. For all Christians combined, 45% believe in heaven and only 20% believe in hell.
Sweden and Denmark are the two European countries with the lowest levels of belief in heaven and hell. Only 7% of Christians in Sweden believe in hell, and 10% in Denmark. Levels of belief in heaven are significantly higher at 17% and 27% respectively.
The much higher levels of belief in the USA are quite similar to those in Latin America and Sub-Saharan Africa, the two other regions where Christianity is the dominant religion.
A good starting point for understanding such difference are the levels and stages of moral development identified by Kohlberg. He proposed that there are three levels of moral development, with each level split into two stages. Kohlberg suggested that people move through these stages in a fixed order, and that moral understanding is linked to cognitive development. The three levels of moral reasoning are labelled pre-conventional, conventional, and post-conventional.
The pre-conventional level is characterized by a morality determined by fear of punishment or expectation of reward. At the conventional level, moral decisions are based on the expectations of social groups or society at large. In modern societies, most children transition from the pre-conventional level around age 8–10 years to the conventional level. In late adolescence or adulthood, some adults move to the post-conventional level, in which inter-individual’s judgements of good and bad become influenced by universal moral principles. If necessary, people at stage 6 may well take actions based on moral assessments derived from universal values, even if they conflict with laws and societal values. Kohlberg had relatively limited empirical data and estimated that around 10–15% of adults in developed countries reached the post-conventional level.
A 2007 review of 120 studies in 42 countries found that “Kohlberg was in principle correct regarding the universality of basic moral judgment development, moral values, and related social perspective-taking processes across cultures.” The evidence suggests that moral stage development is facilitated by social perspective-taking opportunities. Higher stages of moral development were associated with education, social class, urban settings and involvement in volunteer community service, or in university or complex work settings. Ken Wilber has elaborated the link between these stages of individual development and the broad evolution of cultures over the course of human evolution. Wilber also refers to the mindsets associated with the three broad stages of moral values as egocentric, ethnocentric and worldcentric.
When it comes to religion, and specifically Christianity, people at pre-conventional level are motivated primarily by (future) divine punishments and rewards. People at this level interpret heaven and hell in literal terms as the places where they will be rewarded or punished after death for their actions (and in some cases even for their thoughts). This pre-conventional basis for moral decisions can easily be twisted into a basis for threatening non-believers or into a justification for violence as punishment for those who are perceived as sinful.
Religious people at the post-conventional level, by contrast, are not really concerned with punishments or rewards. Heaven and hell are not prominent concepts and indeed hell in particular is very unlikely to be believed to be an actual place as opposed to a metaphor. People at this level are rather concerned with following universal moral principles (love thy neighbor as thyself etc) and caring for others, even if that entails conflict with the laws or general social beliefs. It is these people who will protest against nuclear weapons or leave water in the desert for refugees.
At the conventional level, where most adults are, moral decisions and beliefs will be heavily dependent on the general level of education and cognitive development, the degree that their society encourages social perspective-taking, as well as the levels of belief in things like heaven and hell at societal level (from where the conventional moralist take their guidance).
These factors go some way to explaining the differences in prevalence of belief in heaven and hell between the USA and most other developed countries. In other developed countries, levels of religious practice have been declining for decades, and atheism and non-religiousness have been increasing (see my previous article). There are quite a few countries where the irreligious (atheist and non-religious) are a majority of the population. Most of these countries have high levels of education and strong support for social safety nets.
In contrast, the USA still has relatively high levels of religious belief and participation, an unusually high proportion of Christians who are fundamentalists, lower levels of education, and a very individualistic culture with limited social safety nets and a fairly widespread belief that people who cannot pay for services should not get them.
In the USA, not only those at preconventional level, but also many religious people at conventional level, are likely to believe in heaven and hell because such beliefs are widespread in US culture. That over 50% of people with no religious affiliation say they believe is hell is another indication of how widespread these beliefs are in the general culture.
In the high-income countries of Europe, less than 30% of Christians believe in hell, this figure dropping as low as 7% for Christians in Denmark and Sweden. Among people with no religious affiliation, less than 10% believe in hell. It’s likely that the low levels of belief in hell among Christians are because it conflicts with universal moral principles (such as finite penalties for finite transgressions) and, for a large minority, because it is incompatible with a worldcentric mindset. For many young people galvanized by the global existential issues facing humans today, a belief that the majority of people outside their culture/religion are destined for eternal torture is not only unacceptable but also unbelievable.
Footnote [1] Developed countries include Australia, New Zealand, Canada all European countries including countries of the former Soviet bloc except for the predominantly Muslim “stans” and Azerbaijan. I restricted the category to countries with a historically Christian culture, so do not include Asian countries such as Japan and South Korea.
